This is an odd novel because of (1) its narrative framing and (2) its blend of art/cultural criticism & fiction (and possibly also nonfiction/memoir/“autofiction”). Frankly I think some of it was lost on me. It seems to be in conversation with a lot of literary criticism, postmodern theory, and feminist theory that I am just not very familiar with. So be warned that this review is just diaristic, not critical. There are way better people to read reviews from. For example I had never heard the term “epistolary novel,” which apparently this is.

Narratively, it mostly presented as a series of love letters written by Chris Kraus (authorial self-insert) and sometimes her husband, Sylvère Lotringer (also a real person, to whom Kraus was really married), to Dick __, a colleague of Sylvère’s with whom Chris becomes obsessively extramaritally infatuated and onto whom she projects many desires, frustrations, fears, etc. (as you do with a crush). (Dick is also a real person and Chris did really have a one-sided obsession with him that (I think) involved prolific letter writing.) Chris and Dick met only briefly, flirted (maybe) for a night—and thus started the saga. I will not just recount the story here, but suffice it to say Chris spirals farther into her infatuation and ends up writing several hundred pages of dangerously obsessed letters to a man she does not “really” know. Dick becomes a sort of icon/muse for her, and unfortunately for him she makes no secret of this fact. I saw someone describe the first half as “‘Madame Bovary’ written from the POV of Emma.”

There are great feminist sections of writing in this, particularly about sexism in arts/academia—the way women’s work is considered naive or sentimental if it is not about the subjects lauded by the patriarchal pedagogy, the way men may be bold experimentalists while women are discarded as childish or gauche or one-dimensional—man as subject and woman as object. The book itself, with the moral ambiguity of such a violation of (IRL) Dick’s privacy, is framed at times as a messy work of feminist revolution — “the things women must do to even be noticed, and surely they will not be taken seriously even if they are.” The art criticism is also smart and accessible and introduced me to the great painter Ronald Brooks Kitaj. Also it explained the Deleuze/Guattari capitalist schizophrenia thing better than any of the other brief summaries I’ve read.

I thought I wasn’t going to like this very much at the start—kind of dry and I was sure I had a grasp on it too quickly—but I was surprised by how much I ended up liking it as I continued reading. It felt honest, dangerous, and experimental, and witty too. It contains a sad story of desire and projection and futile attempts to sublimate—things I find relatable.

If this doesn’t sound like it’d freak you out or bore you to tears, check it out